Challenges of Democracy in the 21st Century: Concepts, Methods, Causality and the Quality of Democracy 1351209507, 9781351209502

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Challenges of Democracy in the 21st Century

The effectiveness and capacity of survival of democratic regimes has been recently and widely questioned in the public and political debate. Both democratic institutions and political actors are increasingly confronted with rapid economic and societal transformations that, at least according to some observers and commentators, they not seem to be ready or equipped to manage effectively. This book evaluates and challenges recent scholarly literature on the quality of democracy. It provides a critical assessment of the current state of the studies on the subject, identifying the key questions and discussing open issues, alternative approaches, problems and future developments. Bringing together some of the most prominent and distinguished scholars who have developed and discussed the topic of the quality of democracy during the last decade, it deals with a highly relevant topic in political science and extremely sensitive subject for our democratic societies. This text will be of key interest to scholars of democracy and democratization and more broadly to comparative politics, electoral studies, political theory, power and comparative political institutions. Luca Tomini is FNRS Postdoctoral Researcher at the Université libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium. Giulia Sandri is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Université Catholique de Lille in France.

Democratization Studies (Formerly Democratization Studies, Frank Cass)

Democratization Studies combines theoretical and comparative studies with detailed analyses of issues central to democratic progress and its performance, all over the world. The books in this series aim to encourage debate on the many aspects of democratization that are of interest to policy-­makers, administrators and journalists, aid and development personnel, as well as to all those involved in education. Causes and Consequences of Democratization The Regions of Russia Anastassia V. Obydenkova and Alexander Libman Democratization in EU Foreign Policy New Member States as Drivers of Democracy Promotion Edited by Benedetta Berti, Kristina Mikulova and Nicu Popescu Democratization in the 21st Century Reviving Transitology Edited by Mohammad-­Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou and Timothy D. Sisk Democratizing Public Governance in Developing Nations With Special Reference to Africa Edited by M. Shamsul Haque, Anastase Shyaka, Gedeon M. Mudacumura Political Participation, Diffused Governance, and the Transformation of Democracy Patterns of Change Yvette Peters When Democracies Collapse Assessing Transitions to Non-­Democratic Regimes in the Contemporary World Luca Tomini Challenges of Democracy in the 21st Century Concepts, Methods, Causality and the Quality of Democracy Edited by Luca Tomini and Giulia Sandri

Challenges of Democracy in the 21st Century

Concepts, Methods, Causality and the Quality of Democracy Edited by Luca Tomini and Giulia Sandri

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Luca Tomini and Giulia Sandri; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Luca Tomini and Giulia Sandri to be identified as the authors of the editorial matter, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Tomini, Luca, editor. | Sandri, Giulia, editor. Title: Challenges of democracy in the 21st century : concepts, methods, causality and the quality of democracy / edited by Luca Tomini and Giulia Sandri. Other titles: Challenges of democracy in the twenty-first century Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2018. | Series: Democratization studies ; 37 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017056941| ISBN 9780815381839 (hardback) | ISBN 9781351209519 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Democracy. | Democracy–European Union countries. | European Union countries–Politics and government–21st century. Classification: LCC JC423 .C5121 2018 | DDC 321.8–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017056941 ISBN: 978-0-8153-8183-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-20951-9 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

Contents



List of figures List of tables List of contributors



The quality of democracy: towards a new research agenda

vii viii ix 1

L uca T omini and G iulia S andri

PART I

Concepts and methods 1

Some critical thoughts on researching the quality of democracy P hilippe C

2

15 17

S chmitter

Aggregating a multi-­dimensional concept: the quality of democracy

29

D ir k B erg - ­S chlosser

PART II

Causality and the quality of democracy 3

Accountability through stages of democratization: a causal explanation of quality of democracy

51 53

L uca T omini

4

Democratic quality and democratic survival

72

A n í bal P é re z - L i ñ á n and N oah  S mith

5

Economic crisis and democracy: how to analyse the impact of the former on the latter L eonardo M orlino

88

vi   Contents 6

The cornerstone of quality of democracy: electoral accountability in EU member states

104

S tefano R ombi and F ul v io Venturino

PART III

Beyond the state: territorial dimensions of the quality of democracy 7

Patterns of regional democracy: government forms and performance in federal and decentralized West European countries

123

125

R é gis D andoy , G iulia S andri A N D L I E V E N D E W I N T E R

8

Protecting the rule of law and the state of democracy at the supranational level: political dilemmas and institutional struggles in strengthening EU’s input, output and throughput legitimacy

142

R amona  C oman



Index

174

Figures

1.1 2.1 4.1 4.2 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 8.1 8.2

Approaches to quality of democracy Spider web Significant effects in simultaneous equations model Predicted constraints (95% CIs) Vote changes in consecutive elections for parties in government (average values) Differences in the average government vote percentage, crisis and pre-­crisis phases Vote changes in consecutive elections for anti-­party parties (average values) Average anti-­parties votes percentage: difference between crisis and pre-­crisis phase Cloud representing the most prevalent words used in the 2003 Commission’s Communication Cloud representing the most prevalent words used in the 2014 Commission’s Communication

20 44 81 83 110 112 113 115 162 163

Tables

2.1 Reproduction of HDI 2011 calculations for cases with “low human development” 2.2 HDI calculations with calibrated data 2.3 Synopsis of current measures of democracy 2.4 Quality of democracy: Democracy Barometer 2.5 Data and calculations for Democracy Barometer (2007) 2.6 Indicators of democracy, World Bank data 2.7 Indicators of good governance, World Bank data 4.1 Predictors of democratic breakdown 4.2 Simultaneous equations 5.1 Qualities and relevant empirical dimensions 5.2 The relevant dimensions affected by the economic crisis 5.3 Expectations about the impact on the relevant dimensions (2008–2015) 5.4 Expectations about the impact (2008–2015) and background conditions (2000–2008) 6.1 Occurrence of parliamentary elections from 2000 to 2017 in the EU members 6.2 Number of parliamentary elections held in the 2000–2017 years, by countries 6.3 Data on anti-­party parties from 2000 to 2017 in the 28 EU members 6.4 Bivariate correlation between government votes percentage and economic variables 6.5 Correlation between anti-­party parties votes percentage and economic variables 7.1 The ten institutional dimensions in Lijphart’s model

32 36 40 42 43 45 46 80 82 95 97 98 100 106 107 108 116 117 132

Contributors

Editors Luca Tomini is FNRS Postdoctoral Researcher at the Université libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium. Giulia Sandri is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Université Catholique de Lille, France.

Contributors Dirk Berg-­Schlosser is Professor of Political Science at the Philipps University Marburg, Germany. Ramona Coman is Professor of Political Science at the Université libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium. Régis Dandoy is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Waseda University, Japan. Lieven De Winter is Professor of Political Science at the Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium. Leonardo Morlino is Professor of Political Science at LUISS, Rome, Italy. Aníbal Pérez-Liñán is Professor of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA. Stefano Rombi is Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy. Philippe C. Schmitter is Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the European University Institute EUI), Florence, Italy. Noah Smith is Teaching Assistant at the University of Pittsburgh. Fulvio Venturino is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy.

The quality of democracy Towards a new research agenda Luca Tomini and Giulia Sandri

The challenges of studying the qualities of democracy The effectiveness and capacity of survival of democratic regimes has been recently and widely questioned in the public and political debate. The non-­ scholarly interest in this topic is recently growing, following a supposed trend of ‘failure’ of both advanced and transitional democracies in meeting the needs of their citizens and in effectively providing public goods. With rising inequalities, growing political discontent, an increase in the number of ‘losers’ from economic and social globalization trends, advanced democracies are now facing significant challenges and showing clear signs of difficulty to cope with such societal demands. Both democratic institutions and political actors are increasingly confronted with rapid economic and societal transformation that, at least according to some observers and commentators, they not seem to be ready or equipped to manage effectively. The recent democratic transformations in several European countries, with – for instance – the challenges to the rule of law currently being implemented in Hungary and Poland (see Chapters 3 and 8), and inside the EU, with the increasing evidence of the political weaknesses of some European institutions vis-­à-vis the management of enduring socio-­ economic crises such as mass migration and rising unemployment, show that the public and political debate over the capacity of adaptation and survival of democratic regimes is relevant and well justified. The growing political topicality of democratic quality and of challenges to liberal democracies has also been recently linked to the surge in votes for populist and far-­right parties in recent elections in Western and Eastern Europe and the US. Several observers warned that existing institutions might not be resilient enough to adjust to the changes that such political actors would bring by on crucial democratic cornerstones such as the separation of powers, rule of law, and independence of state and church. A special essay published by The Economist in 2014,1 for example, asked the question ‘what’s gone wrong with democracy?’ with the aim of identifying potential measures for reviving both the political idea and the practical and effective functioning of modern democratic regimes. A similar debate is also ongoing in academia and research. Both political and scholarly observers agree that, given the present situation, the quality of democracy

2   Luca Tomini and Giulia Sandri is in dispute in several advanced and transitional democracies, with the likelihood that this problem will persist since it is not easily resolved and, if resolved, that it would take quite some time to implement operative measures of democratic engineering for countering ‘declining’ trends in current institutions’ efficacy, transparency and accountability. In the same perspective for instance, within a scholarly approach, the Journal of Democracy, one of the main international journals on democracy and democratization, recently published a special issue on ‘Democracy in decline?’ (Plattner 2015), warning about a possible democratic rollback (Volume 27, issue 3, 2016). As never before, at least in recent decades, democracy as a political regime is thus questioned concerning its capacity to answer citizen’s demands. Democratic de-­consolidation, de-­democratization (Tilly 2007) or autocratization (McFaul 2002; Lindberg 2009; Tomini and Cassani 2018), seems thus to be emerging as the next stage in democratization studies (Foa and Mounk 2016, 2017; Inglehart 2016). Since the beginning of the third wave of democratization (Huntington 1993), both the democratization literature and the empirical studies on democracy have greatly developed and flourished. From the classic, macro-­ sociological studies on the structural causes of the crisis and stability of democracy, scholarly research evolved towards a more actor-­oriented analysis on transitions and, especially since the nineties, democratic consolidation, up to the more recent analysis of the quality of democracy.2 This book focuses precisely on the latter and tries to drive forward the research agenda on the study of the quality of democracy. After providing a critical assessment of the current state of the studies on the quality of democracy in this introduction, taking stock of the current cumulative scientific debate and knowledge on the topic, the ambition of the book is, above all, to orient future research and to fill gaps in the existing literature concerning three issues: regarding concepts and methods, stressing the need of a renewed effort towards a qualitative and case-­oriented approach; regarding change, highlighting the importance of a dynamic understanding of the quality of democracy and the respective causes and implications; regarding the level of analysis, pushing for the integration of the sub-­national, supranational and international dimensions in the assessment of the quality of democracy. This book has therefore four main distinguishing features. First, it deals with a relevant topic, i.e. democracy and its qualities, in nowadays political science, which is currently under debate both at scholarly and public/political level. Second, it brings together different generations of scholars on the quality of democracy and democratization. Third, it fills a gap in this literature outlining possible directions of research and future developments, and therefore paving the way for the next generation of study. Fourth, the volume’s main original feature lies in the comparative empirical research it provides. It offers detailed information about democratic transformations in several European and non-­European countries as well as inside the EU, which are analysed in comparative perspective and which are not available in such a form in other collocations.

The quality of democracy   3 The concept of quality of democracy has only recently become a major topic of investigation in the empirical studies on democracy and democratization. The reasons are threefold. First, with the third wave of democratization (Huntington 1993), more and more countries were defined and considered as being ‘democratic’. Very soon scholars recognized that, in order to grasp the distinctive features of these new democracies, the previous analytical tools were insufficient (Altman and PérezLiñan 2002; O’Donnell et al. 2004; Diamond and Morlino 2005). In short, the analysis of the differences between democracies, and especially between the new and the established democracies, could no longer be based on previous approaches adopted by the literature on democratization, transition and consolidation. The use of a minimalist and procedural definition of democracy, which characterized most of the studies on transition and (to a lesser extent) consolidation from authoritarianism to democracy, was explicitly questioned, on the basis in particular of the so-­called ‘fallacy of electoralism’ critique. In their analysis, researchers paid particular attention to the features linked to the electoral democracy (O’Donnell 1996), in order to capture the distinction between the new, democratic and the old, authoritarian regimes. However, this specific conceptualization of democracy did not allow the systematic evaluation of variation in institutional and political settings between democratic systems, either new or established. Moreover, after the initial enthusiasm about the prospects of democratization across the world, scholars have been forced to deal with the fact that, in many countries, the transition has not led to stable and consolidated democratic regimes. In contrast, so-­called ‘hybrid’ regimes (Diamond 2002) and diminished subtypes of democracy and authoritarianism (Collier and Levitsky 1997), which combine both democratic and authoritarian characteristics, emerged. This empirical phenomenon led scholars to focus on the identification of the explanatory factors of these unexpected paths of democratization and of the specific institutional and political features that characterize mixed regimes. In sum, the difficulties faced by many countries during processes of democratic consolidation and the need to address more effectively the differences between democratic, hybrid and non-­democratic regimes, has led scholars to develop new theoretical and methodological approaches so that a more accurate and detailed evaluation of democratic governance could be developed. The second reason concerns the growth of dissatisfaction with the functioning of democracy in the old, consolidated democracies, and the growing feeling of distrust towards state institutions and political parties (Della Porta and Meny 1995). Both phenomena are due to the (supposedly) widespread inefficiency of state institutions and public administration, soaring corruption, failing political representation and increasing social inequality. In order to explain these phenomena, a consistent theoretical framework is needed for examining different dimensions of analysis related to the above-­mentioned broad societal and political trends: the changes in the role and organization of political parties, the crisis of electoral participation and the emergence of new forms of participation, the inefficiency of policy choices, the increase in corruption and the presence of growing social inequality.

4   Luca Tomini and Giulia Sandri The research agenda on the quality of democracy proposes a comprehensive analytical approach, trying to connect and systematize the different findings of the empirical studies developed on each individual dimension of analysis (Diamond and Morlino 2004). In this regard, the methodological and theoretical pluralism of the studies on the quality of democracy aims at providing a comprehensive assessment of the functioning of democracy and of its current challenges, as well as an analytical framework for developing cross-­country comparative research. The need to better understand and explain the multi-­dimensional nature of phenomena such as the ‘crisis’ or ‘transformation’ of democracy (see Schmitter 2016) has thus been one of the driving forces that lead to the emergence of the new wave of studies on the quality of democracy. Third, the increasing use of democratic conditionality (often related in particular to the notion of ‘good governance’) by Western countries, international organizations and NGOs, in the distribution of international development funds or in the framework of EU accession or neighbourhood policy programmes, has prompted scholars and research organizations to develop a quantitative assessment of the performance of democratic regimes. In this context, in recent decades several academic or non-­academic democratic ranking systems have emerged: Freedom in the Worlds,3 the Vanhanen’s index,4 the Democracy index by The Economist,5 the Polity Data Series,6 the Democracy Barometer,7 the Varieties of Democracy (V-­Dem) project8 and many others. Without entering the debate on the methodological and analytical pros and cons of each set of indicators and assessment tools (Munck 2002; see Berg-­Schloesser’s chapter in this book), the importance of democracy quantitative (both subjective and objective) indices has grown over time, leading to the almost current redundancy between competing measures. Besides, each of these sets of indicators is based on alternative concepts of democracy, from electoral to liberal to participatory/deliberative conceptions, which in turn affect the way in which scholars measure democratization and select cases in a way that is reliable, valid and legitimate. The conceptualization of democracy as well as the measurements used and the way in which indicators are aggregated vary significantly from one index to the next. As a consequence, during the last 15 years, a new field of study has been established,9 aiming at analysing the functioning and differences of democratic regimes on the basis of their ‘qualities’ or constitutive dimensions democracy (Lijphart 1999; Altman and Pérez-Liñan 2002; O’Donnell et al. 2004; Diamond and Morlino 2005; Bühlmann et al. 2012; Roberts 2009; Morlino 2011; Geissel et al. 2016). As Gerardo Munck pointed out, the need for a new agenda on the study of the quality of democracy, which ‘subsumes the previous ones on transition and consolidation’, was eventually acknowledged (Munck 2009, p.  67). Beyond the scholarly debate, a new agenda on the study of the quality of democracy is crucial for contributing in promoting effective governance in both advanced and transitioning democracies, for example by understanding how to improve the efficiency and accountability of the public sector, how to strengthen processes of political representation and how to tackle corruption.

The quality of democracy   5

Taking stock of an established literature … and moving ahead After 20 years since the first studies and conceptualizations of this topic were published, the research agenda on the quality of democracy has now definitely passed its ‘infancy’ (Munck and Verkuilen 2002) and is now moving into a more advanced phase of development. Scholars really achieved significant results in this field. First, they defined the concept of quality of democracy and launched a fruitful academic debate on how to theoretically apprehend and empirically measure the variation in the different dimensions or ‘qualities’ of a democratic system. The result was the establishment of a new research agenda and the emergence of countless alternative conceptual approaches. Second, in a more empirical perspective, scholars applied this concept to the empirical reality through comparative analysis, cases studies or large-­N analyses on different geographical regions, such as Europe (and in particular Central and Eastern Europe and Southern Europe), Latin America or South-­East Asia. The comparative empirical assessment of the quality of democracy in various political regimes constitutes therefore the first ground on which to test the main conceptual frameworks on the matter. More specifically, one of the first scholars (with the exception of some important contributions published in international reviews, such as for instance that of Altman and Pérez-Liñan 2002) which addressed the topic of the quality of democracy was doubtless Guillermo O’Donnell and colleagues, with the book entitled The Quality of democracy: Theory and application, published in 2004. In its contribution, O’Donnell and his colleagues laid the theoretical basis of the following discussion, providing also an empirical assessment based on a citizens’ audit in Costa Rica. A major contribution was later provided by Larry Diamond and Leonardo Morlino in an edited volume entitled Assessing the quality of democracy (2005). Debating the topic with some of the most renewed scholars of democracy and democratization, Diamond and Morlino put forward a theoretical approach on the quality of democracy, disaggregating the concept in several dimensions in order to translate this normative concept in the empirical analysis. Some years later, in 2011, Leonardo Morlino took stock of all of his work on democracy and democratization on a book entitled Changes for Democracy. Actors, Structures, Processes. A chapter was devoted on the quality of democracy, where he presented and discussed a refined framework for the empirical analysis. Several studies have been published which focus on applying the above-­ mentioned theoretical frameworks to different empirical grounds. A good example of an empirical analysis based on an original approach on the quality of democracy, was the book by Andrew Roberts entitled The Quality of Democracy in Eastern Europe: Public Preferences and Policy Reforms (2010). This important contribution showed the explanatory potential of this field of study, developing a conception of the quality of democracy based on the importance of public policies in the case of Central and Eastern Europe. A recent important

6   Luca Tomini and Giulia Sandri contribution is the special issue of the International Political Science Review ‘Measuring the quality of democracy’ by Geissel, Kneuer and Lauth (2016). The issue is mainly focused on the debate about concept and measurement of the quality of democracy. All these examples of high-­quality scholarship have explored various theoretical, normative and empirical dimensions of the study of the qualities of democracy in contemporary regimes. At the same time, however, it would be a mistake to ignore some critical issues that, if not explicitly addressed, are likely to lead this promising literature to a standstill. This book aims exactly at this: first, at addressing some of the gaps and critiques in the existing literature on the quality of democracy and, second, at providing new and original insights – theoretical, methodological and empirical – on how to further develop scholarly studies on this topic. The main issues that emerged from the critical evaluation of the literature on the quality of democracy and that we address in this book are fourfold. The first issue concerns the debate on the competing approaches for defining and analysing the quality of democracy. This debate led to the initial development and to the refining of the main research agenda on the quality of democracy. However, the pluralism resulting from the existence of different (and often contrasting) normative perspectives to the basic conceptualization of the quality of democracy, and also from what O’Donnell called the ‘difference between the normative horizons and actual practices of democracy’ (O’Donnell et al. 2004), has sometimes negatively affected the potential for further development of this literature after the first, seminal studies were published. As Morlino (2009) stressed, the problem in coping with this issue is how to deal with a normative topic in order to conduct a proper empirical analysis. In this scholarship, academic indifference and the attempt to simply impose a specific theoretical model and different theoretical components of the concept of the quality of democracy over the others has often prevailed over the scientific dialogue. The second issue is related to the role of causality and the search for a ‘causal theory’ (Munck and Verkuilen 2002, p.  66) of the quality of democracy. The problem concerns the relevance of focusing not only on the description and assessment of the quality of democracy (which most existing empirical contributions, as well as the several indices of democracy, have already achieved in a very effective way), but also on the explanation of change (and on its rationale and explanatory factors) of the quality of democracy. While there is growing ‘saturation’ in the market of democracy indices, which are increasingly precise and accurate (see the most recent V-­Dem project), researchers should devote themselves more convincingly to the search for causality and the explanation of change. On this matter, there is a real gap in the literature that needs to be filled. While the debate on the normative views of the quality of democracy concept as well as on the issue of measuring democratic quality is wide and developed, there is still a long way to go concerning the analysis of change and the causes of change in the quality of democracy. The third issue concerns the integration in this literature study of multiple levels of analysis. The analysis of the quality of democracy should take into

The quality of democracy   7 account all changes that characterize contemporary democracy and, in particular, the processes that involve multiple levels of governance. The assessment of the quality of democracy of countries such as Spain or Germany cannot fail to take into account the fact that these countries are part of a process of European integration, in which supranational institutions play an increasingly important role in the domestic politics, polity and policies. Likewise, the role of sub-­national governments is becoming increasingly relevant in a context of globalization and regional integration, as well as the international influence that needs to be integrated in the evaluation of the quality of democracy. In general, we firmly believe that a new assessment of the quality of democracy should overcome the limitation of a state-­centred approach and should be able to integrate different levels of governance depending on the specific position that a country occupies in the global economic, cultural and geopolitical scenario.

The aim and content of the volume The contribution of this book is therefore related to all the three critical issues presented above in the previous section. By addressing them individually and in connection with each other, the book brings innovative elements to the community of scholars of quality of democracy. The limited (or absent) discussion, both at theoretical and empirical level, of these three under-­researched issues (pluralism in normative approaches, the dimension of causality and the territorial dimension of the study of the qualities of democracy), is the gap in the literature that this book aims at filling. Besides, this volume bridges subareas that are not in conversation with each other, which is the literature on comparative political regimes and governance and the literature on democracy and its assessment. First, the book contributes to the debate on the conceptualization and measurement of the quality of democracy (Chapters 1 and 2). From this point of view, the volume builds on the current literature, complements recent contributions on the same issue (see for example Geissel et al. 2016) and contributes to the conceptual and methodological debate by highlighting the importance of a case-­oriented, comparative, and attentive to the historical, cultural and political context approach in opposition to the current trend of prevalent extreme quantitativism in the field. Since we are dealing with definitions that logically go beyond the minimal definition of democracy, a scientific consensus on the subject may be difficult to achieve, reflecting (on a large scale) the already existing problems of the theories of democracy, which are well acknowledged by the scientific community. Therefore, this volume does not aim to produce further synthesis or to present new approaches and theorizations of the concept, because their scientific added value might be easily questioned. On the contrary, we should recognize the existing normative as well as methodological pluralism in the field. We would therefore like to raise awareness of the need to take a step forward in the scholarly debate on what is and how to study the quality of democracy, mainly by advancing some explicitly empirically oriented analyses of the quality of

8   Luca Tomini and Giulia Sandri democracy as a process. The main assumption of this book is that there is no unified normative conceptualization of the quality of democracy, nor a best fit methodological approach for studying it empirically. The underlying argument of this volume is that research on this topic need to move from a first generation of studies focused on the conceptualization and assessment of the quality of democracy, to a second generation which explicitly consider the quality of democracy as a causal process, both from the point of view of the independent variables (i.e. the consequences of the varying degrees of quality of democracy) and the dependent variables (i.e. the determinants of the quality of democracy). Second, in connection with the previous issue, this book deals with the dynamic dimension of the quality of democracy, i.e. the problem of change. Unlike the previously debated issue on conceptualization and measurement, the current debate on change in the quality of democracy is still in the embryonic state: how and why does the quality of democracy change in a consolidated democracy? What are the causal mechanisms between the various phases of the democratization process and the creation of institutions that achieve varying degrees of quality of democracy? These issues ultimately involve the relationship between the analyses on the quality of democracy and the broader body of literature on the empirical studies of democratization. From a historical perspective, the research agenda on the quality of democracy represents the last stage of the evolution of the empirical literature on democratization that has developed over the decades from the first studies on modernization, social change and the role of the cultural dimension, through the study of transition and consolidation processes, and of the external dimension of democratization. As a consequence, at the moment the central issue that still needs to be addressed is how the findings of the studies on the qualities of democracy relate to the previous knowledge on democratization. In other words, how the studies on the quality of democracy may be integrated within the scholarship on democratization. In this perspective, two main research designs seem viable: first, conceiving the quality of democracy as the independent variable of other macro-­processes or its impact on the correlates of democracy. As an example, research will focus, on the one hand, on the causal link between democratic quality and the likelihood of democratic regression to an authoritarian regime (see the chapter by Pérez-Liñán and Smith in this book) and, on the other hand, on the impact of the quality of democracy on the economic or social performance of states. Second, research on the qualities of democracy can be integrated within the scholarship on democratization by conceiving the quality of democracy as the dependent variable of other macro-­processes or as the result of exogenous factors. In this case research will analyse, on the one hand, the causality between different, interconnected phases of democratization (transition, installation, consolidation) and the resulting quality of democracy of a state; or, on the other hand, the impact of underlying factors such as, for instance, economic development, the presence of social inequality, shared democratic legitimacy, on the quality of democracy.

The quality of democracy   9 The book therefore conceives the quality of democracy as a continuous, dynamic process within which the temporal dimension is essential. Different contributions (from Chapters 3 to 6), even though they use different methodological approaches (with some innovative proposals) and analyse different range of empirical cases, nevertheless share the same focus by converging on the causes and implications of the quality of democracy. The theme of change, explicitly dealt with in the four central chapters of the book, implicitly informs all the contributions of the volume, thus becoming the fil rouge of the entire volume. Third, the final issue that we need to take into account in this book concerns the very nature and the final objectives of the research agenda on the quality of democracy. At the beginning of this introduction, we summarized the scientific and historical reasons that have led to the emergence of this specific strand of literature and have oriented its initial goals. Similarly, current political and social transformations are pressuring scholars for further changes and adaptations in the theoretical and methodological frameworks used to study the quality of democracy across the world. The process of globalization, the development of regional integration (particularly in Europe), new forms of political participation, representation and communication, or the growth of technocratic powers, represent only some of the major underlying processes that are shaping and transforming democratic systems all over the world. For example, it would be hard to empirically measure the quality of democracy of an EU member state (e.g. Greece) on the basis of the exact same analytical model used for Asian countries (e.g. Japan), without taking into account, among other differences, the importance and consequences of regional economic and political integration. Still, it is in some way surprising that most democracy indexes do not take into account or underestimate these issues. This is once again related to the need of taking into account, as a priority, the dimension of change, and hence to focus empirical analyses on the causal relationship between these phenomena and the quality of democracy. From this perspective, an effort is needed from scholars wanting to foster original research on this topic in order to also include the territorial dimension in their empirical or theoretical research. Further studies on the qualities of democracy need to integrate this dimension in all analytical stages (and therefore in the conceptual definition, in the empirical assessment and in the causal analysis) by looking at the international (i.e. globalization processes), supranational and/or sub-­national (i.e. regional integration paths) levels. The book therefore highlights the territorial dimension of the quality of democracy by stressing the importance of the supranational and sub-­national dimensions in assessing the quality of democracy of a country. This is a dimension often forgotten by the literature and the indexes of democracy, which nevertheless deserves to be fully integrated in the overall assessment of the current state of democratic regimes and of their transformations. From this point of view, this section contributes to widening the perspective of existing studies to reach a multi-­level assessment of the quality of democracy, combining sub-­national, supranational and international dimensions

10   Luca Tomini and Giulia Sandri in the research design, as opposed to the state-­centric studies that forget the importance of the external or sub-­national factors. All in all, the present study does not propose an original theory but aims to push forward the study of the quality of democracy to a next stage by using a set of theoretical, methodological and empirical considerations. More importantly, the discussions of definitions and concepts of democracy are not the focus of the book, neither are the different techniques for measuring the quality of democracy. This is a big difference to most of the existing scholarship on the topic. We wanted, rather, to orient the research to empirical changes of the quality of democracy and the respective causes and implications.

The structure of the book The main perspective of this book can be easily summarized as follows: the volume develops a set of theoretical, methodological and empirical suggestions that allows the study of the quality of democracy to move from a static to a dynamic and case-­oriented approach. All the chapters in this volume address these complex issues, on the basis of different approaches and methodologies. However, the book is organized into three main parts, each dealing with a specific theme of this strand of research. Part I focuses on the conceptual and methodological challenges that the studies on the quality of democracy are currently facing. The first chapter (Schmitter) provides an overall critical assessment of the remaining conceptual open questions in the comparative research on the quality of democracy. The chapter takes stock, on the one hand, of the existing dichotomy between the approaches based on universal values vs. those based on chronological, spatial, material and cultural factors and, on the other hand, on the dichotomy between approaches based on objective conditions vs. subjective attitudes on the quality of democracy, and suggests a way to move forward in this debate. Then, the second chapter (Berg-­Schloesser) presents an overview of the different methods for aggregating the dimensions of measurement of the quality of democracy and addresses the major ongoing methodological issues of this strand of empirical research, and proposes a qualitative method of aggregation based on set theory. Part II introduces the dimension of change and the dynamic approach towards the quality of democracy. Chapter 3 (Tomini) discusses the causal connections between quality of democracy, democratic transition and democratic consolidation, looking how the quality of democracy results from these previous interconnected processes. Chapter 4 (Pérez-Liñán and Smith) adopts the opposite perspective, dealing with the causal connections between quality of democracy and democratic regression and assessing how different levels of quality of democracy impact on the likelihood of democratic regression. Chapter 5 (Morlino) provides an overview of the interaction between dimensions of the quality of democracy in the process of change, as a consequence of the impact of an exo­ genous factor such as the economic crisis. With a similar perspective, Chapter 6 (Rombi and Venturino) focuses instead on the impact of the economic crisis on

The quality of democracy   11 the evolution of specific dimension of the quality of democracy, i.e. electoral accountability. Finally, Part III is devoted to the exploration of the territorial dimensions of the quality of democracy that are often forgotten by the existing literature. In particular, the chapters in this section will focus on the sub-­national and international dimensions of the study of the quality of democracy. The first of the two chapters (Dandoy, Sandri and De Winter) discusses the regional dimension of the assessment of the democratic performance of contemporary political regimes, while the second (Coman) explores the interaction between the EU, a supranational actor, and its member states in relation to the respect of the Rule of Law. This edited volume is the outcome of a three-­day international conference which took place in Brussels (Belgium) and Lille (France) from 5–7 March 2015. The conference, entitled ‘Assessing the quality of democracy: Challenges and perspectives’, was jointly organized by the Institute of European Studies (IEE) of the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), together with the European School of Political and Social Sciences (ESPOL) of the Université Catholique de Lille.

Notes 1 The Economist, 1–7 March 2014 issue, pp. 43–48. 2 For a first glance on democratization literature, see Lipset (1959); Rustow (1970); O’Donnell and Schmitter (1986); Pridham (1991); Linz and Stepan (1996); O’Donnell (1996); Przeworski et al. (1996); Schedler (1998); Carothers (2006); Teorell (2010); Morlino (2011). 3 https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-­world/freedom-­world-2015#.VXa7V2AyynY. 4 www.nsd.uib no/macrodataguide/set html?id=34&sub=1. 5 www.eiu.com/Exception.aspx?aspxerrorpath=/default.aspx. 6 www.systemicpeace.org/polity/polity4.htm. 7 www.democracybarometer.org/. 8 https://v-­dem net/. 9 For an extensive coverage off the literature on the quality of democracy, see Lijphart (1999); Levine and Molina (2001); Altman and Pérez-Liñan (2002); Berg-­Schlosser (2004); O’Donnell et al. (2004); Diamond and Morlino (2005); Beetham et al. (2008); Morlino (2009; 2011); Roberts (2010); Bühlmann et al. (2012); Geissel et al. (2016); Munck (2016).

References Altman, D. and A. Pérez-Liñan (2002) ‘Assessing the Quality of Democracy: Freedom, Competitiveness and Participation in Eighteen Latin American Countries’. Democratization 9(2): 85–100. Beetham, D., E. Carvalho, T. Landman and S. Weir (2008) Assessing the Quality of Democracy: A Practical Guide. Stockholm: International IDEA. Berg-­Schlosser, D. (2004) ‘The Quality of Democracies in Europe as Measured by Current Indicators of Democratization and Good Governance’. Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 20(1): 28–55. Bühlmann, M., W. Merkel, L. Müller and B. Wessels (2012) ‘The Democracy Barometer: A New Instrument to Measure the Quality of Democracy and its Potential for Comparative Research’. European Political Science 11(4): 519–536.

12   Luca Tomini and Giulia Sandri Carothers, T. (2006) Promoting the Rule of Law Abroad: The Problem of Knowledge. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Collier, D. and S. Levitsky (1997) ‘Democracy with Adjectives: Conceptual Innovation in Comparative Research’. World Politics 49(3): 430–451. Della Porta, D. and Y. Meny, eds. (1995) Démocratie et corruption en Europe. Paris: La Découverte. Diamond, L. (2002) ‘Thinking About Hybrid Regimes’. Journal of Democracy 13(2): 21–35. Diamond, L. and L. Morlino (2005) Assessing the Quality of Democracy. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Foa, R. S. and Y. Mounk (2016) ‘The Danger of Deconsolidation: The Democratic Disconnect‘. Journal of Democracy, 27(3): 5–17. Foa, R. S. and Y. Mounk (2017) ‘The Signs of Deconsolidation‘. Journal of Democracy 28(1), pp. 5–16. Geissel, B., M. Kneuer and H.-J. Lauth. (2016) ‘Measuring the Quality of Democracy: Introduction’. International Political Science Review 37(5): 571–579. Huntington, S. P. (1993)  The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.  Inglehart, R. (2016) ‘The Danger of Deconsolidation: How Much Should We Worry?’. Journal of Democracy 27(3):18–23. Levine, D. and J. E. Molina, eds. (2001) The Quality of Democracy in Latin America. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Lijphart, A. (1999) Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-­six Countries. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Lindberg, S., ed. (2009) Democratization by Elections: A New Mode of Transition. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Linz, J. and Stepan, A. (1996) Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lipset, S. M. (1959) ‘Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy’. American Political Science Review 53(1): 69–105. McFaul, M. (2002) ‘The Fourth Wave of Democracy and Dictatorship: Non-­cooperative Transitions in the Post-­communist World’. World Politics 54(2): 212–244. Morlino, L. (2009) ‘Qualities of Democracy: How to Analyze Them’. Studies in Public Policy: 465. Morlino, L. (2011) Changes for Democracy. Actors, Structures, Processes. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Munck, G. (2002) ‘Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy. Evaluating Alternative Index’. Comparative Political Studies 35(1): 5–34. Munck, G. L. (2009) Measuring Democracy: A Bridge between Scholarship and Politics. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Munck, G. L. (2016). ‘What is Democracy? A Reconceptualization of the Quality of Democracy’. Democratization 23(1): 1–26. Munck, G. L. and Verkuilen, J. (2002) ‘Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy: Evaluating Alternative Indices’. Comparative Political Studies 35(1): 5–34. O’Donnell, G. (1996) Illusions about Consolidation. Journal of Democracy 7(2): 34–51. O’Donnell, G. and Schmitter, P. (1986) Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. O’Donnell, G., J. Vargas Cullel and O. Iazzetta (2004) The Quality of Democracy: Theory and Applications. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

The quality of democracy   13 Plattner, M. F. (2015) ‘Is Democracy in Decline?’. Journal of Democracy 26(1): 5–10. Pridham, G. (1991) ‘International influences and democratic transition: Problems of theory and practice in linkage politics’. In Pridham, G. (ed.) Encouraging Democracy: The International Context of Regime Transition in Southern Europe. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Przeworski, A., M. Alvarez, J. Cheibub and F. Limongi (1996) ‘What Makes Democracies Endure?’ Journal of Democracy 7(1): 39–55. Roberts, A. (2009) The Quality of Democracy in Eastern Europe: Public Preferences and Policy Reforms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rustow, D. (1970) ‘Transition to Democracy: Toward a Dynamic Model’. Comparative Politics 2(3): 337–363. Schedler, A. (1998) ‘What is Democratic Consolidation?’ Journal of Democracy 9(2): 91–107. Schmitter, P. C. (2015) ‘Crisis and Transition, But Not Decline’. Journal of Democracy 26(1): 32–44. Teorell, J. (2010) Determinants of Democratization: Explaining Regime Change in the World, 1972–2006. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Tilly, C. (2007) Democracy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Tomini, L. and Cassani, A. (2018) Autocratization in Post-­Cold War Political Regimes – The Reverse Wave Hypothesis. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Part I

Concepts and methods

1 Some critical thoughts on researching the quality of democracy Philippe C. Schmitter

Introduction The quality of democracy (QoD) has become the flavor of the year or perhaps of the decade among students of democracy—and not just among those studying new democracies. The suspicion has arisen and spread that, while it is manifestly the case that more and more polities around the world have the institutions of liberal, constitutional, electoral, representative democracy, in more and more of these cases (old as well as new) their respective democracies are not meeting the expectations of their citizens. The gap between what democracy promises them and what it delivers seems to be widening. Hence, political scientists have been competing among themselves to find negative and diminutive qualifiers—e.g., delegative, defective, flawed, façade, pseudo-, partial-, semi-, ersatz-, stalled-, low intensity, hybrid, illiberal—they can place in front of the term “democracy,” that serve to undervalue the status and accomplishments of both “real-­existing democracies (REDs)” and “newly-­existing democracies” (NEDs). This widespread academic exercise presumes two things: (1) the presence of valid evidence of citizen dissatisfaction with their performance and (2) the existence of valid standards for measuring the quality of these democracies. Only if the first is true, would it be worthwhile spending much effort on conceptualizing and researching the second. As for item (1), the evidence is considerable. Random surveys of public opinion in both REDs and NEDs routinely “discover” that an increasing proportion of respondents do not think that their vote counts, or that their rulers are paying attention to them. Most dramatic has been the decline in trust in core democratic institutions: elected politicians, political parties, and legislatures. But these same surveys often show that the decline also affects non-­ elected authorities: military, police, public administration, even scientists and physicians. Skepticism, in other words, has become a general characteristic of better-­educated and informed publics—even if it tends to be focused on the political process.1 Interestingly, these surveys also tell us that interest in politics and the sense that politics affects one’s life-­world has been stable or even increasing. So, the gap exists, but so does the awareness of it and the desire, presumably, to narrow it.

18   Philippe C. Schmitter On the more quantitative side, scholars have observed a litany of “morbidity symptoms” to illustrate the extent of decline in a large number of both NEDs and REDs. At the top of it, one usually finds declining levels of electoral participation and party membership or identification, and a rise in electoral volatility and problems in forming stable governments. Previously dominant centrist parties find their ideologies are no longer credible to the public and are losing vote share to newly emerging marginal ones on the far (and usually populist) Right or Left. Parliaments have become less central to the decision-­making process, having been displaced by greater concentration of executive power and a more important role for so-­called “guardian institutions” dominated by (allegedly) independent experts. Governing cabinets have more and more members who have not or never been elected and who have often been chosen for their “supra-­party” affiliations. Membership in and conformity to class-­based intermediaries—trade unions and employers’ associations—has declined and this has negatively affected the influence of the former. Meanwhile, large firms, especially financial ones, have increased their direct access to the highest circles of decision-­making. It should come as no surprise that income inequality in REDs has increased at a rate not seen since mass enfranchisement occurred in the late 19th Century. As far as the “usual suspects” are concerned, there exists a rather similar consensus about the generic causes of crisis and decline. At the top, one almost always finds globalization since it has supposedly deprived the national state of the autonomy it previously enjoyed in order to be effective and responsive to the demands of its citizens. Multi-­national enterprises, international financial institutions and, at least in Europe, multi-­layered regional governance arrangements have imposed a complex mixture of constraints and opportunities that greatly limit economic and social policy agendas and the capacity to regulate and tax capitalists and their firms. Changes in the structure of production have weakened the collective consciousness of workers and undermined the class cleavage that had long provided the basis for Left and Right political parties. Changes in sectoral composition have vastly increased the importance of financial institutions that hire few (and very well-­paid) employees that have little or no interest in collective action. Politics has become a full-­time profession, rather than a part-­time affair. Most of those who enter it expect to spend their entire careers there—and they surround themselves with other professionals: speech writers, media consultants, pollsters, “spin-­doctors” and so forth. Citizens become increasingly aware that their representatives and rulers live in a different and self-­referential world. Voting preferences have shifted from class, sector, and professional interests to a more individualistic basis related to issues of personal life style, religious/ethical conviction and the personality of candidates. If that were not enough, citizens have become better educated and more skeptical about the motives and behavior of their politicians. And they increasingly can access much more independent (and critical) sources of information on the internet. Also, enormous flows of South–North migration have affected the very demographic composition of the population of most REDs, such that substantial proportions of residents in them have no citizen rights or prospects for gaining

Researching the quality of democracy   19 them. This cultural diversity has undermined perceptions of living in a common demos with a shared fate and, hence, a mutually acceptable sense of the public good. Pace the current populist resistance to this phenomenon in Europe and the US, REDs in the future will have accommodate to such diversity and build it into their reformed institutions. More conjunctural factors have also allegedly played an important role. First and foremost, the collapse of Soviet-­style “People’s Democracy” deprived Western REDs of one of their primary bases of legitimacy, namely, their manifest superiority over their Eastern rivals. Henceforth, REDs have had to satisfy the more demanding criteria of equality, access, participation, and freedom promised by democratic ideals. The wave of democratizations that began in 1974 also contributed to a general rise in expectations and unrealistic assertions about “the End of History.” Neo-­liberal reforms failed to produce their promise of continuous growth, fair distribution, and automatic equilibration—leading by 2008 to the Great Recession which many REDs (especially in Europe) proved incapable of mitigating, much less resolving quickly. At the core of this consensus about crisis in QoD lies the heavy reliance that the practice of RED and NED places upon representation—especially representation by means of political parties that compete regularly and fairly in elections within territorial constituencies that are expected to produce—directly or indirectly—a set of legitimate rulers.2 Admittedly, parties have never been “loved” by citizens partly because they are an overt expression of the interest and ideological cleavages that divide them, but also because there is ample reason to suspect—vide Roberto Michels—that they are unusually susceptible to oligarchy and prone to self-­serving corruption (Michels 1962).3 None of this should be surprising since all REDs are condemned to be defective. Old democracies and new democracies may have their own specific deficiencies, but both are based on complex historical compromises with such rival orders as monarchism, socialism, nationalism, imperialism and, most of all, capitalism. They are “mixed regimes” with many non-­democratic components that are bound to frustrate some of the expectations of some of their citizens, and they rely heavily on circumscribed and indirect mechanisms, not the least of which is that of representation. They are all, in other words, works in progress moving in dubious directions that fail to live up to the potential embedded in democracy’s core semantic notion of “rule by the people.” At best, they are based on “rule by politicians” who claim to represent their interests and ideals and who are ultimately accountable to them. Even so, there seems to be little or no doubt that contemporary democracies— old as well as new—have many more disgruntled and alienated citizens than in the past (not to mention, the even more disgruntled and alienated foreign denizens that live among them and are deprived of democratic rights).4 Public opinion surveys during the past decade or so, as we have noted, tend to reflect this—although the proportion of those still answering “yes” to the question: “Is democracy is the best regime for your country” remains consistently high. So, item (1) is satisfied; now, let us pass to item (2).

20   Philippe C. Schmitter

The grounds for academic intrusion Faced with this evidence from the actors themselves, why should academics bother with agonizing (and inconclusive) discussions about how to define and measure the QoD?5 The answer would seem to be simple: just let citizens decide for themselves what they think the relevant criteria should be and ask them in public opinion polls what they think about the QoD in their country.6 There are three good reasons why this may be insufficient: 1

2

3

Respondents may be incapable of distinguishing between the performance of the government in power and the nature and effect of the regime that brings these rulers to power and presumably affects (but does not completely determine) their behavior. Respondents may only be aware of the political institutions that exist in their country (and that usually call themselves democratic) and, hence, be incapable of imagining how a different configuration of these institutions might improve the QoD. Respondents in mass surveys are typically induced to respond to immediate events and to express opinions with regard to them, but are much less capable of reflecting on the relation between these stimuli and more deeply embedded values that will eventually structure their expectations concerning democracy.

ONTOLOGY

There is, therefore, considerable room for the intrusion of academic specialists into the debate about QoD, which is not to say that the literature in recent years that has examined it does not need some redirection. In Figure 1.1, I have made an effort to categorize the approaches that have been adopted.

Objective conditions

Subjective Attitudes

Quantitative composite indices

?

?

Public opinion surveys

Process (inputs and through-puts) vs. Product (outputs)

Figure 1.1  Approaches to quality of democracy.

Researching the quality of democracy   21 On the horizontal (epistemological) dimension, we find those scholars on the left who assert that evidence for the QoD should be gathered according to universalistic criteria. All democracies—old and new—should be judged by the same generic principles.7 This presumes that all citizens want and expect the same behavior from their rulers—regardless of where they are located, how long they have been democratic, what cultural norms prevail or what level of development they have attained. On the right side are those who are more sensitive to discriminating temporal, spatial, material, and normative factors that are likely to affect citizen expectations and, hence, the need to rely on relativistic criteria. This distinction is cross-­tabulated by an ontological one, i.e., whether the process of assessment can be captured by objective indicators independent of actor perceptions or subjective ones articulated by respondents. The vast bulk of research on QoD can be found in the upper left and lower right cells—although there have been a few cases of “mixed method” research.8 The former consists of a vast effort to collect aggregate data that “audits” and quantifies performance according to universalistic principles postulated by (liberal or social) democratic theory; the latter relies on public opinion data gleaned from random mass surveys that leaves the specification of principles to the citizens of specific countries (and, hence, is compatible with a pluralistic conception of what RED should accomplish).9 Without denigrating what has been accomplished by both approaches, I propose to explore the empty cells in Figure 1.1: (1) the one that combines universalistic and subjective criteria and (2) the one that combines particularistic with objective criteria. First, one has to define RED in a manner that is not exclusively linked to one set of institutions—usually, elections in territorial constituencies in which political parties compete for task of representing citizens’ interests and passions. “Modern political democracy is a regime or system of government in which rulers are held accountable for their actions in the public realm by citizens acting indirectly through the competition and cooperation of their representatives” (Schmitter and Karl 1991). Note that this definition has three components, each of which deserves to be evaluated. Citizens are the central and most distinctive component of all REDs. Representatives are another essential component; however, one must keep in mind that there can be various direct channels of citizen action depending on the type of democracy. Finally, there are always rulers whose role is presumably legitimated by the collective action of citizens who choose them, but are also capable of withdrawing their consent according to some pre-­established sanctioning mechanism. Having recognized that the process of holding rulers accountable involves a set of multiple mechanisms equally available (at least in principle) to all citizens, the second step is to dis-­aggregate the concept and practice of democracy into its multiple “partial regimes.” In other words, the purpose of the analysis is to evaluate not the quality of democracy but its qualities independent of each other.

22   Philippe C. Schmitter The lower left cell In the lower left cell, the basic strategy of research would be to rely on a disaggregated version of public opinion research that would be capable of identifying citizen judgment about specific “partial regimes”—rather than focus exclusively on their evaluation of the regime as a whole. What is needed are subjective perceptions of the discrete items that compose the quantitative/objective components of QoD indices—beyond assuming that they are universally valued and equally appreciated. Something similar has already become commonplace when respondents in polls are presented a list of institutions and asked how much they trust each of them. Typically, political parties receive the lowest score, followed by trade unions, governments, parliaments, courts, and mass media. The Spanish research reported in FN vi went further and asked for opinions about which innovations might best improve the QoD. Just to provide an example, Spaniards preferred “more honesty,” “more participation and direct democracy,” “more use of referendums,” “greater social equality,” “greater transparency in the financing of political parties,” and “limitations on the power of economic groups”—not a surprising list, although some fashionable reform proposals such as “participatory budgeting,” electoral primaries,” “greater gender equality,” “increase in the power of parliament” and “greater internet consultation” received only very weak support. The upper right cell However, it is in the upper right quadrant that the most challenging and innovative approach to studying QoD can be found. Here, one would be disaggregating not citizen opinion about specific partial regimes but the objective qualities of the regimes themselves. Its point of departure is the (questionable, but researchable) assumption that similar or identical institutions will produce similar or identical effects across countries. The objective would be to specify ex hypothesi on the basis of the existing comparative literature in political science—normative as well as empirical—which institutional configuration of each partial regime is most likely to produce the best QoD—and then adjust this presumption to the particular context in which it is being practiced. I would be the first to admit that it may not be possible to do this for all thirty-­three partial regimes, but for those that have been most extensively studied—e.g., (1) electoral systems, (2) party systems, (3) executive-­legislative relations, i.e., presidentialism-­parliamentarism, (4) interest group bargaining/lobbying, i.e., pluralism/corporatism and (5) territorial distributions of authority—it should be feasible. Consider the following scoring system. Assume for a minute that, through comparative analysis, political science is capable of specifying what is, at any moment in time, the best practice for ensuring the equality of citizen participation in, say, legislative and presidential elections. Further suppose we could identify a series of criteria observed in different countries that, taken together, embody the best practices for accomplishing this. We could then measure the

Researching the quality of democracy   23 QoD according to how close any given country comes to approximating these “best practices” for ensuring citizen equality in holding rulers accountable —acknowledging that in any specific case it may be impossible to implement them due to lack of material or other resources. Nevertheless, the analysis will have posited an explicit standard that is particular to that partial regime and that might be achieved at some future moment. Moreover, if such a “best practice” is not implemented and nevertheless subjective satisfaction with existing institutional performance improves, then, we will have discovered something significant about the intrinsically contingent nature of politics. Let us take first (and tentatively since I am not an expert in this field) the example of elections. Let’s say every country gets 100 points to start with. Then twenty points are subtracted if people can only vote in national elections and no sub-­national elections are held. Only ten points would be subtracted if the electorate votes in national and local/provincial elections. In short, what is important is the existence of elections at multiple levels that have some degree of independence from each other and are not simply choreographed from above, Sovietor Yugoslav-­style. So, the first rule would be that a country gets points deducted if it does not have multiple and independently conducted elections. A country receives a large point deduction—say, forty points—if voting rules exclude adult minority populations on ethnic, religious, gender, ideological, or other grounds. Equivalent deductions might be made if informal restrictions result in similar distortions in electoral behavior. The question of voting rights for resident foreign citizens is particularly sensitive. In Europe today, one of the most serious discussions about the declining QoD is the increasing proportion of legally resident citizens who do not have citizen rights. This issue will only get more serious in the future. A country should lose one point for each percentile of the age-­eligible legally resident population that is not registered to vote—either de jure or de facto. Moreover, in United States, there is no permanent electoral registration as in Europe. There are many people in the United States who have never registered to vote, perhaps because they have moved around or because they just have never bothered to try. In Europe, registration is compulsory, automatic, and permanent. Compared to American democracy, therefore, European countries would score de jure relatively high on this criterion. There is another interesting comparison between Europe and the United States. In at least some American states, if an individual has been convicted of a felony he or she is denied civic rights, even after serving the sentence. Since, frankly, these convicts do not constitute a random sample of the population— they tend to have skewed toward some racial groups—this seems like a fairly systematic policy of ethnic discrimination. The policy with respect to felons is different in Europe. In European countries, one cannot vote while in jail, but upon completion of the sentence, the individual is automatically placed back on the voting rolls as a full citizen. These may not be great numbers of votes, to be sure, but if an election is close and such situations accumulate over time, they can make a difference.

24   Philippe C. Schmitter Another possibility might be to give a country a one-­half point deduction for each percentage decile of the total votes cast that does not contribute to the election of any candidate. This is, of course, a discrimination against first-­past-the-­ post systems where if a candidate wins 51 percent to 49 percent, the 49 percent of the voters do not contribute to the candidate’s election and may therefore even feel unrepresented by the winner. In proportional representation (PR) systems, the handling of remainders and other features can vary considerably, but in most of them literally every vote contributes to the election of a candidate. There is also the matter of systems with an excessive number of parties where, even with PR, many may not gain a single seat in parliament because of some minimal threshold (3 percent–5 percent–7 percent). In the initial post-­Communist election in Poland, for example, there were fifty-­six parties running, and 53 percent of Poles voted for parties that did not get a single seat in parliament. So we saw the unusual situation in which the Polish parliament was elected by 49 percent of the voters and still included about seventeen or eighteen parties that had managed to make it over the threshold for securing at least one seat. A country could also receive a one-­point deduction for each percentile decline in voting turnout compared to the moving average over the three previous elections. Many scholars argue that the lower the turnout, the lower the QoD. That is not necessarily the case; that is, some countries have different, persistent habits related to turnout, some of which stem from other electoral rules. My favorite case is Switzerland, which has the lowest voter turnout in Europe. Swiss turnout is regularly at 30–35 percent, and almost never changes in any significant way. But if one asks the Swiss about the quality of their political system, over 80 percent will tell you they have the best political system in the world. In my view, what indicates an objective decline in the QoD in this quadrant is a decline in the average score. Interpreting the historical trend is important, and then what counts is whether or not one sees a persistent change one way or the other. In addition, obviously, any accusations of fraud or issues related to fraud need to be considered. If, using this tentative scoring system, a polity evaluated on the quality of its electorate or citizen participation is given a score of, say, twenty or even lower, it obviously cannot be considered a democracy. At best, it is some sort of hybrid, if not an “electoral autocracy.” If the country receives a score of less than seventy, it deserves some sort of adjectival condemnation, be it “defective” or “semi” or some other term. But our evaluative task in the upper right cell does not end here. In this quadrant, QoD also depends on the subjective opinion of citizens—as expressed either in normal political discourse and behavior or surveys of public opinion. Academic specialists may agree on what practices best correspond to the historic ideals of democracy, but this is no assurance that citizens will agree with such an assessment or that they will voluntarily take advantage of the equal opportunities offered them. In REDs, these practices are not only systematically biased in terms of who participates in them and how significantly this participation is experienced, but the actual rules governing these partial regimes are usually the result of complex historical compromises.

Researching the quality of democracy   25 In ideological terms, the most serious compromise has been with liberalism— indeed, many Western analysts of RED cannot even conceive of democracy’s not being liberal. The definition proposed here emphasizes “vertical accountability” rather than the “horizontal accountability” that may prevail in the relationship between branches of government and “guardian institutions” of public regulation. And, much evidence suggests that citizens agree that they must be protected from their own (majoritarian) impulses and choices. Presumably, the tradeoff is between a collective preference for a regime that is capable of acting positively to realize common purposes and one that, by being prevented from doing so, is more likely to avoid the risk that this poses. The “liberal” option is to prevent the potential misuse of public power; the “democratic” one is to empower citizens to act collectively. Any given RED will be some combination of institutions and rules that embody this tradeoff—and its QoD will be evaluated accordingly. In material terms, the most serious compromise is with capitalism and, again, most analysts are aware that, while not all capitalist economies have had democratic polities, all of the latter have had capitalist economies. This again poses some serious tradeoffs that may be evaluated in different ways by different publics and in different countries. The inequality that is intrinsic to capitalism via the distribution of productive property and financial assets collides with the formal equality of rights and resources that is presumed to be the basis of democracy. All of the opportunities contained in the partial regimes sketched above are unequally exploited in a fashion that more or less corresponds to the position of individual citizens in the distribution of property and other assets. And yet, even citizens who are highly conscious of their democratic status and of their limited opportunities to exercise it have come to accept these limitations. Presumably, they are sensitive to the tradeoff between a more socially just economy based on greater equality and a more prosperous one based on the entrepreneurial behavior of property owners. What determines the acceptance of this mix would seem to be highly particularistic—rooted in distinctive historical choices and cultural norms.

Three strategies for comparative research of quality of democracy I suggest three potential strategies for those who—despite all the complexities we have noted—would still like to continue to grapple with questions regarding the QoD. The first, of course, is to evaluate the QoD among groups of countries that are democratizing more or less within the same timeframe, because questions regarding the standards for evaluating democracy and expectations about democracy have changed radically over time. Displacing standards across long periods of time does not appear to be valuable or valid. If we consider the successful wave of democracy following the end of World War II, the QoD in those countries cannot really be compared with the quality of the new democracies that have emerged after 1974 or after 1989, because the standards for evaluation have systematically changed with the passage of time. Moreover, at any given moment in time, especially among those polities that democratize more or less

26   Philippe C. Schmitter simultaneously, there is likely to be a considerable degree of diffusion of such standards from one experience to another. In short, the goalposts of QoD have moved to produce a much larger playing field. A second suggestion is to compare the quality of democracies only across countries within the same cultural area or geopolitical region, as one can assume the existence of certain common evaluative elements at the point of departure. This was relatively easy to do when we began studying Central and Eastern Europe, due to the simple fact that these countries previously had all been living under roughly the same kind of autocracy and their ranges in economic development and sometimes even the degree of relative openness, among other features, fit within a fairly narrow range. We could compare them at a point of departure as if they all had the same potential, except, of course, for those in the former Republic of Yugoslavia, which rapidly descended into ethnic warfare that obviously changed the entire equation radically. As a final suggestion, all countries that have been REDs for 20 or more years—regardless of where they are today—should be considered to have the same potential for building the quality of their democracy in the future. If the country has been able to sustain democracy over a certain length of time, there is a high likelihood that the same criteria for evaluation of performance will have become valid. For example, using measures to compare the performance over time of places like Costa Rica or Uruguay with European countries is perfectly valid because these countries have had, with an important interruption in the case of Uruguay, long-­term democratic regimes and have been practicing, albeit differently, various kinds of social welfare policies.

Conclusion If the quality of new and old REDs is declining, does this pose a threat to the survival of democracy itself? Is democracy in decline and in danger of collapsing? In the past, most attention was focused on a potential return to outright autocracy, usually by military coup. But, under contemporary circumstances, the effective threat to RED does not come primarily from the supporters of the previous autocracy or of some novel form of autocracy; it comes from self-­proclaimed democrats who are dissatisfied with existing practices and outcomes and are convinced that they can improve the QoD by changing the type of democracy—the configuration of institutions that ensure accountability to citizens. As I have argued elsewhere, there definitely is a crisis of the quality of RED as perceived by its citizens, but this should not be interpreted as a decline in democracy but as a transition to some new—perhaps, post-­liberal, type of democracy (Schmitter 2015).

Notes 1 The survey-­based, public opinion literature on QoD is substantial. For a survey of it, see Pippa Norris (2011). For the argument that it should provide the basis for assessments of QoD, see Logan and Mattes (2012).

Researching the quality of democracy   27 2 See Schmitter (2001), pp. 67–89, for a more detailed analysis of why the role of political parties in REDs has declined so much. 3 More recently, his “Iron Law of Oligarchy” has been re-­baptized by the Italian press as “partitocrazia”—an expression that has rapidly diffused throughout the political universe. 4 The central message of a White Paper on “The Future of Democracy in Europe” (Schmitter and Trechsel 2004) which I have written with a group of other scholars and politicians for the Council of Europe, concerns the increasingly defective performance of these democracies and, consequently, widespread and growing public dissatisfaction with them. We assemble a good deal of aggregate and survey data to support this claim over the last thirty years and then project them forward for another twenty years in order to draw inferences about what RED might look like unless some serious effort at reform is made in the meantime. We also suggest what sort of reforms might intervene to improve the quality of “future existing democracy” in Europe. The time series evidence seems compelling to us that the quality of real-­existing democracy has been diminishing—at least in Europe (we do not evaluate its performance elsewhere). The inescapable conclusion is that new democracies and old democracies do not form two separate clusters or distinct trajectories; they overlap. Depending on the scoring and weighting system ones applies, it is not clear at all that neo-­democracies are necessarily doing worse than archeo-­democracies, especially if one takes into consideration differences in their respective points of departure and direction of change. 5 Actually, it would be preferable if the literature referred consistently to the qualities of democracy since it should by no means be taken for granted that they cluster into a single dimension. 6 For a recent article that does precisely this for Spain, see Tezanos (2014). 7 The Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance Stockholm (IDEA) list is typical (if a bit longer): participation, authorization, representation, accountability, transparency, responsiveness, and solidarity. Rather surprisingly, the list does not include a specific reference to the equality with which citizens are supposed to enjoy and respect the exercise of these principles, but one can perhaps assume that it is implied in all of them (Landmann 2008). 8 By far the best empirical study of QoD, using a multiplicity of methods is “Informe Final de la Encuesta Nacional para la Auditoria ciudadana de la calidad de la democracia” (San José, Costa Rica: UNIMER, 1999). This Project is discussed in O’Donnell et al. (2004). 9 At the risk of generating further confusion in what is already a complex topic, I should point out that the two-­dimensional, four-­fold Figure 1.1 should actually be “cubic,” i.e., contain a third dimension, that of time. This would distinguish between QoD indicators that measure only one point in time and those based on a series of such observations over time. This distinction is particularly relevant for research on NEDs since they are in the process of choosing and implementing new institutions which are bound to take time to produce their intended (and unintended) effects.

References Landmann, T., ed. (2008) Assessing the Quality of Democracy. An Overview of the International IDEA Framework. Stockholm: IDEA. Logan, C. and R. Mattes (2012) “Democratizing the Measurement of the Quality of Democracy: Public Opinion Data and the Evaluation of African Political Regimes.” European Political Science 11(4): 469–491. Michels, R. (1962) Political Parties: A Sociological Study of Oligarchic Tendencies of Modern Democracy. New York: Crowell-­Collier. Original version 1911.

28   Philippe C. Schmitter Norris, P. (2011) Democratic Deficit: Critical Citizen Re-­visited. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. O’Donnell, G., J. Vargas Cullel, and O. Iazzetta (2004) The Quality of Democracy: Theory and Applications. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Schmitter, P. C. (2001) “Parties are not what they once were,” in L. Diamond, R., Gunther (eds.) Political Parties and Democracy. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press: 67–89. Schmitter, P. C. (2015) “Crisis and Transition, but not Decline.” Journal of Democracy 26(1): 32–45. Schmitter, P. C. and T. Karl (1991) “What Democracy is … and is not.” Journal of Democracy 2(3): 75–88. Schmitter, P. C. and A. H. Trechsel (2004) “The Future of Democracy in Europe. Trends, Analyses and Reforms. A Green Paper for the Council of Europe.” Strasbourg: Council of Europe. Tezanos, J. F. (2014) “Los retos de la calidad de la democracia.” Sistema 235(June): 3–38. UNIMER (1999) Informe Final de la Encuesta Nacional para la Auditoria ciudadana de la calidad de la democracia. San José, Costa Rica, www.cl.undp.org/content/chile/es/ home/presscenter/pressreleases/2016/09/09/pnud-­presenta-iv-­encuesta-auditor-­a-a-­lademocracia html.

2 Aggregating a multi-­dimensional concept The quality of democracy1 Dirk Berg-­Schlosser

Introduction The last two decades have not only been characterized by a new “wave” of democratization, but also by renewed attempts of conceptualizing and measuring complex concepts like development or democracy. At the same time, the availability and quality of international data bases compiled by official institutions like the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) or the World Bank, Non-­Governmental Organizations (NGOs) like Freedom House or the Bertelsmann Foundation, or university-­based large-­scale data-­sets like the New Democracy Barometer (NDB) at Zurich or the “Quality of Governance” project at Goteborg have been greatly improved. But even with this wealth of data controversies persist about the proper measurement and aggregation of multi-­ dimensional concepts (Coppedge and Gerring 2011). This is the focus of this chapter. Instead of following a purely quantitative and statistical approach, here I take a set-­theoretic and in some ways more qualitative perspective as developed, in particular, by Charles Ragin (2000, 2004, 2008a) during the last few years. This perspective puts special emphasis on a context- and problem-­oriented approach with regard to measurement problems. In Ragin’s words: “social scientists have devoted far too much time to measures that indicate only the positions of cases in distributions and not nearly enough time to developing procedures that ground measures in substantive and theoretical knowledge” (Ragin 2008b: 197). This requires the careful calibration of data for which “fuzzy sets” are of central importance. At the same time, fuzzy set scores offer new ways of aggregating data across several dimensions also taking into account the necessity or sufficiency of certain conditions. In the following, I discuss first the problem of calibration taking the widely used Human Development Index (HDI) published by UNDP as an example. I show how this procedure can affect current ratings and rankings and discuss some recent improvements in this regard. The next section then provides a brief overview of current measures of democracy. This is followed by presenting the new and more complex “Democracy Barometer” and demonstrates how calibration and aggregation by fuzzy scores can be usefully implemented here as

30   Dirk Berg-Schlosser well, in particular as far as the “necessity” of certain dimensions in a multi-­ dimensional concept of democracy is concerned. The final section, in a similar way, takes democracy and good governance indicators of the World Bank as another example. This shows how such procedures can distinguish more clearly between fully democratic, autocratic, and a number of “hybrid” cases.

Calibrating and aggregating the Human Development Index In contrast to quantitative metric measurements, such as interval or ratio scales, calibration involves the setting of minimum and maximum values with regard to a specific concept and a cross-­over point according to which a value is more in or more out of the set of cases defined by such a concept. This implies the careful contextualization of the set under consideration relating it to “real-­world” conditions. For example, the widely used Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita indicator as a metric scale can be calibrated to have a minimum value below which human existence is not sustainable in the longer run, i.e., an “absolute poverty” line, and a maximum value of great abundance above which additional income becomes relatively meaningless. This is similar to a calibration in physics, for example, where the Celsius measure of temperature is calibrated on the freezing and boiling points of water (at sea level) leading to the common 100-points scale between these contextually given parameters, at which specific “phase shifts” (in this case from ice to water and steam) occur. Temperature could, however, also be calibrated differently according to minima or maxima which are “unbearably cold” or “unbearably hot” for human beings over a longer period of time. The specific calibration thus depends on the context and purpose of each measurement. In the case of GDP per capita the difference between purely metric measurement and calibration also becomes clearer when we compare the living conditions of persons at, say, US$500 per year and those at $1,000 which makes a great difference in real life. By contrast, the same metric difference between, say, $20,000 and $20,500 is relatively insignificant for someone’s standard of living. In the following, we will exemplify this further by discussing the possible calibration of the HDI and its several dimensions. Since 1990 UNDP has published the HDI. This index is composed of three separate indicators “life expectancy at birth,” “Gross National Income (GNI) per capita” measured in constant purchasing power parities (PPP), and a “sub-­index education” which in turn combines “mean years of schooling” for the adult population and “expected years of schooling” for school age children. In the course of time, this index has become the most widely used measure of “human development” in its major dimensions of economic well-­being, health, and education. In spite of some remaining limitations, it is vastly superior to measuring GDP per capita alone, a still very widely used indicator (World Bank 1978ff.) which neglects subsistence income, the actual purchasing power of US dollars also depending on fluctuating international exchange rates, and income distribution (see also Streeten 1995). International rankings are often based on the HDI as a shorthand expression of human development and important policy decisions by national and international

Aggregating a multi-dimensional concept   31 development agencies are influenced by this yardstick. It makes a difference, for example, whether a country is considered to be “less” (LDP) or “least” (LLDP) developed by the International Development Association (IDA), the “World Bank’s Fund for the Poorest,” in order to be eligible for subsidized loans with lower interest rates and better long-­term conditions. The HDI follows earlier attempts to assess a wide array of social and economic indicators by the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), established in 1963 (McGranahan 1995). The availability and reliability of such data have been greatly improved over time and the HDI itself has undergone some important changes that will be briefly discussed below. In the meantime, some more differentiated measures reflecting gender, ethnic, or regional distributions, an “Inequality Adjusted Human Development Index” (IHDI), and a “Multi-­dimensional Poverty Index” (MPI) have also been developed (http://hdr.undp.org/en/). The individual indicators certainly reflect important dimensions of human existence and overall life chances. The aggregated index and the respective rankings can, however, create some misperceptions about actual developments. For example, an improved rank of a few places of a country from one year to the next may be based on a deterioration of the situation in real terms, if some others have been doing worse, or may have been due to some technical modifications of the index. In the original version, the aggregated HDI was simply based on the arithmetic means of the three major indicators after having been standardized from 0 to 1 in the usual statistical fashion. Important differences on these indicators, for example relatively low values on education or life expectancy in high-­income (e.g., oil-­producing) countries were thus averaged out, “lost in aggregation.” One important improvement was the setting of “goalposts,” i.e., minimum and maximum values for each indicator based on empirical observations for the maxima and a somewhat arbitrary minimum for the income indicator that can be conceived as subsistence level or an “absolute poverty” line. Each sub-­index is thus calculated according to the formula: actual value – minimum value ___________________________ Dimension index = ​          ​ maximum value – minimum value This already amounts to some form of calibration in contrast to the usual GDP/ cap. indicator. In addition, for income the natural logarithm is now used to avoid the distorting effect of unusually high incomes for the overall distribution (see also Anand and Sen 2000). In 2010, another major innovation was introduced using the geometric mean instead of the arithmetic mean for aggregation. The formula thus became: 1 _

1 _

1 _

HDI = life​​​ 2 ​​ × education​​​ 2 ​​ × income​​ ​2 ​​ (http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/HDR_2011_EN_TechNotes.pdf, p. 168). The effects of these conversions are reproduced in Table 2.1 showing some discrepancies between the old and the new index and the respective rankings, especially toward the lower end of the table.2 Such discrepancies are particularly

0.755 0.586 0.705 0.717 0.772 0.670 0.590 0.713 0.499 0.737 0.603 0.675 0.718 0.620 0.503 0.770 0.664 0.609 0.445 0.538 0.585 0.648 0.458 0.598 0.559 0.569 0.607 0.654

142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169

Solomon Island Kenya Sao tome and Principe Pakistan Bangladesh Timor–Leste Angola Myanmar Cameroon Madagascar Tanzania Papua-New Guinea Yemen Senegal Nigeria Nepal Haiti Mauritania Lesotho Uganda Togo Comoros Zambia Djibouti Rwanda Benin Gambia Sudan

[2]

[1] 0.343 0.531 0.324 0.372 0.364 0.211 0.337 0.303 0.451 0.395 0.390 0.331 0.190 0.340 0.379 0.247 0.374 0.285 0.448 0.360 0.402 0.217 0.499 0.293 0.255 0.248 0.213 0.239

[3] 0.506 0.609 0.601 0.382 0.452 0.624 0.503 0.513 0.573 0.597 0.505 0.323 0.480 0.416 0.492 0.491 0.422 0.448 0.548 0.599 0.532 0.594 0.442 0.282 0.618 0.512 0.501 0.243

[4] 0.413 0.387 0.413 0.464 0.391 0.487 0.557 0.391 0.431 0.302 0.370 0.447 0.444 0.406 0.434 0.351 0.346 0.419 0.403 0.347 0.297 0.341 0.362 0.451 0.348 0.374 0.365 0.421

[5] 0.426 0.581 0.451 0.385 0.415 0.371 0.421 0.403 0.520 0.496 0.454 0.334 0.309 0.406 0.442 0.356 0.406 0.365 0.507 0.475 0.473 0.367 0.460 0.294 0.506 0.365 0.334 0.247

[6] 0.510 0.509 0.508 0.504 0.500 0.495 0.486 0.483 0.482 0.480 0.466 0.466 0.462 0.4459 0.458 0.458 0.454 0.453 0;450 0.446 0.435 0.433 0.430 0.430 0.429 0.427 0.420 0.408

[7]

Table 2.1  Reproduction of HDI 2011 calculations for cases with “low human development”

0.531 0.518 0.523 0.522 0.526 0.509 0.489 0.502 0.483 0.512 0.476 0.485 0.490 0.470 0.459 0.492 0.472 0.464 0.452 0.453 0.452 0.452 0.433 0.448 0.438 0.436 0.435 0.441

[8] –0.021 –0.009 –0.015 –0.018 –0.026 –0.015 –0.003 –0.020 –0.002 –0.032 –0.009 –0.020 –0.028 –0.011 –0.001 –0.034 –0.018 –0.011 –0.002 –0.007 –0.017 –0.019 –0.003 –0.018 –0.009 –0.009 –0.016 –0.033

[9] 141 146 144 145 142 148 152 149 154 147 155 153 151 157 159 150 156 158 163 160 162 161 169 164 166 167 168 165

[10] 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169

[11]

–1 3 –4 1 4 4 –4 3 –3 2 3 –7 –2 –1 3 –1 –2 5 –1

–4

↓ ↑

↓ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↓ ↑ ↓ ↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↑ ↓ ↓ ↑ ↓

↓

[12]

Cote d’Ivoire Malawi Afghanistan Zimbabwe Ethiopia Mali Guinea-Bissau Eritrea Guinea Central African Republic Sierra Leone Burkina Faso Liberia Chad Mozambique Burundi Nigeria Congo (Democratic Republic)

0.558 0.540 0.452 0.495 0.619 0.496 0.444 0.656 0.538 0.448 0.438 0.559 0.580 0.466 0.477 0.480 0.547 0.448

0.253 0.324 0.254 0.553 0.113 0.152 0.173 0.260 0.121 0.270 0.220 0.095 0.300 0.115 0.092 0.205 0.110 0.265

0.350 0.494 0.506 0.552 0.475 0.459 0.506 0.269 0.479 0.364 0.401 0.349 0.612 0.398 0.510 0.581 0.274 0.457

0.377 0.289 0.380 0.190 0.325 0.346 0.329 0.240 0.309 0.280 0.286 0.349 0.140 0.344 0.314 0.186 0.266 0.147

0.304 0.409 0.367 0.565 0.237 0.270 0.302 0.270 0.246 0.321 0.303 0.187 0.438 0.219 0.221 0.353 0.177 0.356

0.400 0.400 0.398 0.376 0.363 0.359 0.353 0.349 0.344 0.343 0.336 0.331 0.329 0.328 0.321 0.316 0.295 0.286

0.413 0.413 0.399 0.417 0.394 0.371 0.358 0.389 0.364 0.349 0.343 0.365 0.386 0.343 0.338 0.340 0.330 0.317

Notes   [1] HDI rank.   [2] Life expectancy at birth (minimum value: 20, maximum value: 83.4).   [3] Mean years of schooling (minimum value: 0, maximum value: 13.1).   [4] Expected years of schooling (minimum value: 0, maximum value: 18).   [5] Natural logarithm of Gross National Income (GNI) per capita (minimum value: 100, maximum value: 107731).   [6] Sub-index education (see HDI Technical Notes: 168).   [7] HDI score using geometric mean.   [8] HDI score using arithmetic mean.   [9] Difference between geometric and arithmetic mean ([7]–[8]). [10] Rank by arithmetic Mean. [11] Rank by geometric Mean. [12] Difference rank [10]–[11].

170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 –0.013 –0.013 –0.002 –0.041 –0.031 –0.011 –0.005 –0.040 –0.020 –0.007 –0.006 –0.033 –0.057 –0.016 –0.016 –0.024 –0.035 –0.031

171 172 173 170 174 177 180 175 179 181 183 178 176 182 185 184 186 187

170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187

1 1 1 –3 2 4 –2 1 2 3 –3 –6 –1 1 –1

↑ ↑ ↑ ↓ ↑ ↑ ↓ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↑ ↓

34   Dirk Berg-Schlosser pronounced, for example, for Nepal (–7) and Liberia (–6) in a negative sense or Namibia (+6) or Zambia (+5) in a positive direction where the impact of single deviating values is now felt more strongly. The neighboring ranks of Senegal (+4) and Nigeria (–4) in the original HDI are now separated by eight points! A set-­theoretic perspective and the use of fuzzy set scores can further affect the distribution (and significance!) of such values. For each HDI indicator a maximum and a minimum value is established at which a country can be considered to be “fully in” or “fully out” of the respective set. These values (in contrast to the “goalposts” of the improved HDI) are based on the actual empirical distribution of the indicators. In addition, a “cross-­over point” has to be marked indicating a position where a country is neither fully in nor fully out of a set (note: the cross-­over point need not be the halfway mark between the minima and maxima in a metric sense, but can be placed according to the actual distribution of cases and the respective context). To some extent such cross-­over points are, of course, arbitrary, but they can and should be grounded on substantive and theoretical knowledge of the problem concerned and not just on statistical distributions. For example, a GNI per capita value of $60,000 (and above) may be considered to be “fully in” the set of the high-­income countries, the minimum ($200) being close to the lowest empirical values in Table 2.1 (for Liberia and the Democratic Republic of Congo).3 A cross-­over point may be fixed here at, say, $10,000, a value above which at current rates a democracy is unlikely to fail (Przeworski et al. 2000). This procedure can be facilitated with a macro within Excel (available from the author) where these parameters can easily be changed and all subsequent fuzzy scores are changed accordingly. Similar substantive arguments must be used (and must be made transparent and justified!) for the respective values of the other indicators. These have been set here in a tentative manner for illustrative purposes. To be “fully in” the set of populations with a long-­life expectancy was taken here to be eighty or above, the minimum to be at forty-­five (near the observed lowest values for Sierra Leone and the DRC), and a cross-­over point of sixty-­five (the pension age in many countries). Similarly, the “fully in” value for mean years of schooling has been set at twelve (the years for secondary education in many parts of the world), a minimum of 1 (close to the low values in Mozambique, Burkina Faso, or Ethiopia), and a cross-­over point of 6 (rudimentary primary education). Expected years of schooling accordingly have been set at 4 (close to the minimum in Sudan, Niger, or Eritrea), 10 as cross-­over point (some secondary, “O-­level”), and 16 (tertiary). The results are presented in Table 2.2. When we now compare the country ranks established by the geometric means of the new HDI (column 1) with the ranks according to the geometric means of the calibrated fuzzy scores (column 14), it turns out that some countries are considerably downgraded, whereas others move up. Thus Ukraine, for example, scores 18 ranks less, New Zealand 20, Georgia 22, and Cuba 35. Conversely, the United Arab Emirates have a 14 ranks higher score, Singapore 15, Oman 16, and Kuwait 20. This means that, in particular, the greater diversity on the income indicator now becomes apparent with some of the oil-­rich countries scoring

Aggregating a multi-dimensional concept   35 better and some of the post-­communist states having lower ranks in spite of their achievements on the other indicators which are no longer averaged out.4

Assessment of measures of democracy Over the last few decades, there has been a multitude of attempts to develop reliable and valid measures to assess empirically the state of democracy all over the world. Some of these have been one-­shot attempts by individual authors (e.g., Cutright 1963; Bollen 1980; Coppedge and Reinecke 1991; Hadenius 1992), others have developed into more or less continuous enterprises covering longer time spans (e.g., Freedom House, Polity IV). They all have their special characteristics, strengths and weaknesses, and may serve different purposes. Each such attempt is faced with problems of conceptualization, operationalization, and aggregation (see also Munck and Verkuilen 2002). Conceptualizations can be very encompassing, attempting to capture all major features of contemporary democracies in a detailed qualitative “democratic audit” (Beetham 1994) or very “minimal” and narrow in a Schumpeterian sense for large-­scale quantitative assessments (e.g., Przeworski et al. 2000). Similarly, operationalizations can be very elaborate, using long checklists and coming up with dozens and sometimes even hundreds of individual indicators (e.g., the more recent versions of Freedom House and Polity or the NDB and Varieties of Democracy (V-­Dem) research projects), or they rely on very simple easily available data such as official electoral statistics (Vanhanen). The more encompassing the conceptualization and the more elaborate the operationalization, the more crucial become various procedures of aggregation. These may consist of relatively simple arithmetic means that often tend to blur important discrepancies of the individual indicators (“lost in aggregation”). Multiplication and geometric means are already more discriminating, for example if one indicator is zero (like the lack of competition in elections in Communist states in the past), the overall result is also zero, even if another indicator (election turnout) is close to 100 percent. Over and above these general criteria characterizing a specific measure, each of the current ones has some special features that have to be taken into account. The data provided by Freedom House, the Polity Project, and Vanhanen’s studies have the broadest (practically worldwide) coverage and are available for the longest time spans (Polity and Vanhanen beginning in the early 19th century). It is important to be aware, however, of their specific limitations as well. Freedom House, in spite of its frequent use, has a relatively narrow conceptualization (in fact, it explicitly is not a measure of democracy, but only of one of its dimensions, i.e., “freedom”). In the first two decades (1972–1992), its scores have been based on the assessments by a single coder (Raymond Gastil) who, as somebody put it, was drawing the numbers from his hat after having read the New York Times. Since then operationalization, sources, and coding have become broader, but the aggregation procedures converting the longer checklists into the seven-­point scales remain intransparent. There also still seems to be some source and coder (US, some say conservative) bias.

0.595 0.303 0.492 0.515 0.631 0.437 0.152 0.506 0.165 0.557 0.330 0.445 0.516 0.358 0.172 0.627 0.427 0.340 0.080 0.228 0.302 0.402 0.101 0.323 0.261 0.277 0.337 0.411

142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169

Solomon Islands Kenya Sao Tome and Principe Pakistan Bangladesh Timor–Leste Angola Myanmar Cameroon Madagascar Tanzania Papua New Guinea Yemen Senegal Nigeria Nepal Haiti Mauritania Lesotho Uganda Togo Comoros Zambia Djibouti Rwanda Benin Gambia Sudan

[2]

[1]

Table 2.2  HDI calculations with calibrated data

0.350 0.579 0.324 0.387 0.377 0.176 0.342 0.297 0.491 0.417 0.411 0.334 0.150 0.345 0.396 0.224 0.390 0.274 0.487 0.372 0.427 0.185 0.545 0.284 0.235 0.225 0.179 0.214

[3] 0.426 0.580 0.569 0.240 0.345 0.603 0.421 0.436 0.526 0.562 0.424 0.151 0.387 0.290 0.405 0.403 0.300 0.339 0.489 0.565 0.465 0.557 0.328 0.089 0.594 0.435 0.418 0.031

[4] 0.081 0.066 0.081 0.120 0.068 0.143 0.238 0.068 0.093 0.032 0.058 0.106 0.103 0.077 0.095 0.049 0.047 0.085 0.075 0.047 0.030 0.045 0.054 0.109 0.048 0.059 0.055 0.086

[5] 0.386 0.580 0.429 0.305 0.361 0.326 0.380 0.360 0.508 0.484 0.417 0.224 0.241 0.317 0.401 0.300 0.342 0.304 0.488 0.458 0.446 0.321 0.423 0.160 0.373 0.313 0.273 0.081

[6] 0.265 0.226 0.258 0.266 0.249 0.273 0.240 0.232 0.199 0.205 0.199 0.219 0.234 0.206 0.187 0.210 0.190 0.206 0.143 0.170 0.160 0.179 0.132 0.178 0.167 0.173 0.172 0.142

[7] 0.354 0.316 0.334 0.313 0.353 0.302 0.257 0.312 0.256 0.358 0.268 0.258 0.287 0.251 0.223 0.325 0.272 0.243 0.214 0.244 0.259 0.256 0.192 0.197 0.227 0.217 0.222 0.193

[8] –0.089 –0.090 –0.076 –0.047 –0.104 –0.029 –0.017 –0.080 –0.057 –0.153 –0.069 –0.039 –0.053 –0.045 –0.035 –0.116 –0.082 –0.037 –0.071 –0.074 –0.099 –0.076 –0.061 –0.020 –0.061 –0.044 –0.050 –0.051

[9] 140 146 143 147 141 149 156 148 158 139 153 155 151 159 165 144 152 161 168 160 154 157 172 170 164 167 166 171

[10]

166 160 171 161 165 162 163 169

142 149 144 141 145 139 146 148 157 155 156 151 147 154 159 152 158 153 168

[11]

[13] 2 –3 1 –2 5 –2 –8 1 –8 12 –1 –2 3 –4 –9 13 6 –2 –8 1 8 6 –8 –5 2 2 –2

↑ ↓ ↑ ↓ ↑ ↓ ↓ ↑ ↓ ↑ ↓ ↓ ↑ ↓ ↓ ↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ↑ ↑ ↓

[12] –2 –3 –1 6 –4 10 10 1 –16 –3 4 4 5 6 –8 –6 8 –4 –12 –3 1 9 –1 5 3 2

↓ ↓ ↓ ↑ ↓ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ↑ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↑ ↑ ↓ ↑ ↑ ↑

–6 4 1 8 2 1 –7 –4 –4 2 7 1 –3 5 6 –8 –3 –4 3 –7 4 1 5 5

↓ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↓ ↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↑ ↓ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑

[14]

Côte d’Ivoire Malawi Afghanistan Zimbabwe Ethiopia Mali Guinea-Bissau Eritrea Guinea Central African Republic Sierra Leone Burkina Faso Liberia Chad Mozambique Burundi Niger Congo (Democratic Republic of the)

0.259 0.230 0.092 0.160 0.357 0.161 0.078 0.415 0.227 0.085 0.070 0.261 0.295 0.114 0.131 0.135 0.242 0.085

0.231 0.324 0.233 0.604 0.048 0.099 0.126 0.241 0.058 0.254 0.188 0.025 0.293 0.051 0.021 0.169 0.044 0.247

0.192 0.407 0.425 0.495 0.379 0.355 0.426 0.070 0.385 0.213 0.268 0.190 0.584 0.264 0.432 0.538 0.077 0.353

0.061 0.028 0.062 0.009 0.039 0.047 0.041 0.017 0.034 0.026 0.027 0.048 0.003 0.046 0.036 0.009 0.022 0.004

0.211 0.364 0.315 0.547 0.134 0.187 0.232 0.130 0.150 0.232 0.224 0.069 0.414 0.116 0.094 0.301 0.058 0.295

0.149 0.133 0.121 0.092 0.124 0.112 0.090 0.097 0.105 0.080 0.075 0.095 0.074 0.085 0.076 0.070 0.068 0.047

0.177 0.207 0.156 0.238 0.177 0.132 0.117 0.187 0.137 0.114 0.107 0.126 0.237 0.092 0.087 0.148 0.107 0.128

–0.028 –0.074 –0.035 –0.146 –0.053 –0.019 –0.027 –0.090 –0.032 –0.034 –0.032 –0.031 –0.163 –0.007 –0.011 –0.078 –0.039 –0.081

Notes   [1] HDI rank.   [2] Calibrated sub-index: Life expectancy at birth (fully out: 45, crossover: 65, fully in: 80).   [3] Calibrated sub-index: Mean years of schooling (fully out: 1, crossover: 6, fully in: 12).   [4] Calibrated sub-index: Expected years of schooling (fully out: 4, crossover: 10, fully in: 16).   [5] Calibrated sub-index: Gross National Income (GNI) per capita (fully out: 200, crossover: 10000, fully in: 60000).   [6] Sub-index Education, geometric mean of [3] and [4].   [7] Geometric mean of [2],[5] and [6].   [8] Arithmetic mean of [2],[5] and [6].   [9] Difference between geometric and arithmetic mean ([7]–[8]). [10] Rank by arithmetic mean. [11] Rank by geometric mean. [12] Difference rank [10]–[11]. [13] Difference HDI rank [1] and rank arithmetic mean [10][14] difference HDI rank [1] and rank geometric mean [11].

170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 174 169 176 162 175 179 182 173 178 183 185 181 163 186 187 177 184 180

167 170 173 178 172 174 179 176 175 181 183 177 184 180 182 185 186 187 ↑ ↓ ↑ ↓ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↓ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↓ ↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ↓

7 –1 3 –16 3 5 3 –3 3 4 2 4 –21 6 5 –8 –2 –7

–4 2 –4 11 –1 –4 –6 4 –4 –5 19 –3 –3 8 2 7

↓ ↑ ↓ ↑ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↑ ↓ ↓ ↑ ↓ ↓ ↑ ↑ ↑

↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ↑ ↑ ↓ ↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ↑ ↓ ↑ ↑

3 1 –1 –5 2 1 –3 1 3 –2 –3 4 –2 3 2

38   Dirk Berg-Schlosser The Polity Project initiated by Ted Gurr and now continued on a broad, long-­ term government (CIA) funded basis has some special characteristics, too. Initially, it also was based on the scores by a single coder (Ted’s wife Erika) focusing mainly on constitutional and other legal documents and historical sources for the long-­term assessments. Whether constitutional texts also reflected the political reality of the times could not be ascertained in this way. In the meantime, sources and coding have become broader-­based as well and some inter-­coder checks are now carried out. The focus remains, however, mainly on institutional and constitutional features. Tatu Vanhanen’s almost life-­long efforts have been more straightforward and simple only using “objective” (official electoral statistics) data not being influenced by coder perceptions. He cannot, however, determine in this way whether elections actually have been “free and fair” as a minimal democratic requirement and official data have to be taken at their face value. This makes the procedure transparent, but its validity remains restricted and his scores should at least be supplemented by other information concerning political rights and civil liberties in cases where elections alone are a poor indicator of the state of democracy as in many semi-­authoritarian or “hybrid” cases. Sometimes his index is also (mis-) interpreted to reflect the “quality” of democracy in a particular country, i.e., the higher, the better. This is clearly not the case. Why should a higher level of party fragmentation in parliament (his measure of competition) indicate a “better” democracy in a normative sense? More recently, a number of other broad-­based attempts have become available. These are the Democracy Index compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) of the “Economist” magazine, the Bertelsmann Transformation Index (BTI) sponsored by the German-­based Bertelsmann Foundation, and the “governance” indicators provided by the World Bank Institute. The EIU index has a somewhat broader conceptualization; it is largely based on expert judgments but also includes attitudinal aspects at the micro level as reported in Gallup polls and the World Values Survey (WVS). It is still rather recent; the exact procedures are not transparent. The BTI also follows a broader conceptualization including aspects of “stateness” as a pre-­condition for democracy in Juan Linz’s sense (“no state, no democracy”). It is based on rather elaborate expert judgments and relatively transparent procedures. Its focus lies, however, exclusively on the non-­ Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), i.e., less “developed” countries, its findings are, therefore, not comparable with those for longer-­established democracies. The World Bank indicators now have the broadest coverage and have been available since 1996. Two of the indicators, “voice and accountability” (i.e., “perceptions of the extent to which a country’s citizens are able to participate in selecting their government, as well as freedom of expression, freedom of association, and free media”), and “rule of law” (i.e., perceptions of the extent to which agents have confidence in and abide by the rules of society, and in particular the quality of contract enforcement,

Aggregating a multi-dimensional concept   39 property rights, the police, and the courts, as well as the likelihood of crime and violence) can also be interpreted to be measures of dimensions of democracy. These are based on a large variety of sources, including now the Freedom House, Polity, EIU, Transparency International, Amnesty International etc. reports and findings. From these the respective aggregated indicators are extracted by means of a principal components analysis. Standard errors are reported. Altogether, even though limited in its conceptualization, the reliability and validity of this measure are quite high. Two more ongoing ambitious research projects must be mentioned at this place. One is the NDB located at the University of Zurich and the Science Center Berlin. Its conceptualization is rather broad comprising nine dimensions, which are aimed at detecting more fine-­grained differences among the longer-­ established democracies that are overlooked in the Freedom House or Polity scales (there, almost all OECD countries get the highest scores). Methodologically it is also more advanced and transparent, but was initially limited to the OECD world. The other is the recently initiated V-­Dem project, mainly based at the Universities of Notre Dame and Goteborg. This is by far the most comprehensive and ambitious one, exploring the realization of seven democratic “principles” by employing almost 400 individual indicators. It has the most elaborate reliability and validity checks and uses multiple advanced forms of data aggregation at different levels including also local and sub-­national regional ones. The project is constantly updated, data for free public use have become available since early 2016. Table 2.3 compares the major measures off democracy.

Calibrating and aggregating indices of democracy: the “Democracy Barometer” For the present purposes, I take the nine-­dimensional NDB as an example to illustrate the problem of calibrating and aggregating indicators of the quality of democracy. There are several techniques to address this problem. In addition to the arithmetic and (already superior!) geometric means discussed above, another option is to rank-­order indicators if they have an increasing cumulative property like in a Guttman scale (Blalock 1979). This is, however, often not the case and indicators have to be considered as being largely independent of each other. Such indicators can be constituent parts of a broader overarching concept (like “Human Development” in the HDI) and their latent coherence can be extracted by a confirmatory factor or principal components analysis. Similarly, item response theory (IRT) models can produce latent scales across a number of distinct measures of an overarching concept like “democracy” (Treier and Jackman 2008; Pemstein et al. 2010). Here, I again demonstrate the possible use of fuzzy scores, this time for complex aggregation problems like in all the major indices of democracy. The nine dimensions of the NDB refer to individual liberties, rule of law, public

political rights civil liberties

195 countries since 1972

annual

media

arithmetic

not reported

Dimensions

Coverage

Up-dates

Sources

Aggregation

Reliability

Freedom House

inter-coder since 1999

arithmetic

official documents, Keesing’s archive

annual

164 countries since 1800

executive recruitment executive constraints political competition

Polity

depending on source

multiplication

official elections statistics

irregular

not reported

standard errors reported

principal components

multiple

arithmetic

annual

experts, surveys (WVS)

internal checks

weighted, arithmetic

experts

bi-annual

Non-OECD 128 countries since 2003

stateness participation rule of law democratic stability social integration

voice + account. rule of law

213 countries since 1996

BTI

World Bank

bi-annual

165 countries since 2007

electoral process civil liberties functioning government political participation political culture

participation competition

187 countries since 1810

EIU

Vanhanen

Table 2.3  Synopsis of current measures of democracy

worldwide 1900 to present OECD 30 countries 1990–2007

internal checks

stepwise, arithmetic

experts, documents

inter-coder checks

multiple

experts

annual

Seven principles: electoral liberal majoritarian consensual participatory deliberative egalitarian individual liberties rule of law public sphere competition institution constraints government capability transparency participation representation

later

V-Dem

NDB

NGO

private

country reports country reports since since 2002, maps 2010, maps

Organization

Funding

Additional information

Government support

research project

books, papers

private

sole author commercial

news magazine

full dem.: >8 flawed dem. 6–7.9 hybrid 4–5.9 authorit. 10

autocr:. –10 to –6 hybrid –5 to +5 democr.: +6 to +10

free: 5.0

Categories

commercial 0–10

free

low

some source + coder bias

0–100

1–7 (1 = best)

Scales

high

restricted

–10 to +10

free, internet

free, internet

availability

some source + coder bias

medium

some source +coder bias

Transparency low of procedure

Validity

country data reports

World Bank

UN body

regional reports, maps

foundation

foundation

papers, newsletter

foundation

research project

country ranks consol.dem.: 8–10 defect.dem. 6–8 strong defect. 5.3–6 mod. author. 4–5.3 hard author.